


Keep Your Salvation

by the49thname



Category: Borderlands (Video Games)
Genre: Gift Fic, Introspection, M/M, Rhys has lots of feelings save him
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-09-11
Updated: 2017-09-11
Packaged: 2018-12-26 14:09:03
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,453
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12060576
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/the49thname/pseuds/the49thname
Summary: Becoming CEO of a dead corporation wasn’t what Rhys initially had in mind for himself. Rhack / introspective Rhys POV oneshot.





	Keep Your Salvation

**Author's Note:**

  * For [spacejellybeans](https://archiveofourown.org/users/spacejellybeans/gifts).



> Hey, not posted for this fandom before but it was my sister's (spacejellybeans) birthday so I wrote a little Rhack oneshot set just before Rhys is captured by the Mysterious Traveller!! Hope you enjoy reading, and let me know what you think!!
> 
> Song the fic was written to: Afterlife by Nothing But Thieves  
> Warnings: spoilers for Episode 5

Becoming CEO of a dead corporation wasn’t what Rhys initially had in mind for himself.

It had always been his dream to stand tall; taller than his peers, taller than his rivals, his contemporaries, his bosses. Forever being an underdog had instilled a desire in him to succeed, and the cutthroat brutality of corporation life fanned that initial spark into a wildfire. It had always been a dark path, toeing the line between careful manipulation for personal gain and reckless paranoid abandon, for who could you really trust in a world of backstabbers? Even supposed friends - or certain synthetic-haired assholes - could be willing to throw you out the not-so-proverbial airlock.

The road to hell was paved with good intentions, right?

It seemed strange to think that a bunch of Pandoran con artists, a rag tag gang of what the corporate elite would consider nothing but caked-on shit on the bottom of their well-polished, thousand dollar skag-skin shoes, would show him what a certain robot would state with un-ironic innocent joy was ‘the power of friendship’. Not that he’d been without friends on Helios; ignoring the one selling out incident that was Never To Be Spoken Of Again, he’d at least had Vaughn before Pandora claimed them both for her own. Yvette no longer counted, though he supposed it was no surprise in the end.

But even after trawling through the desert dust with people who may or may not have wormed their way into his heart unexpectedly, there was still that ever-present need to walk faster, reach higher, to no longer be the forgettable company man, but someone _better_. If he wanted to he could reach higher even that his once-idol, once-friend, once-enemy, now nothing more than bloodied wire and busted cybernetics, slowly gathering dust in the box he hid in his desk.

Well, it hardly constituted a desk. Becoming CEO of Atlas came with certain perks, but not the life of luxury he would have had - always wanted to have - if Helios hadn’t crash-landed into the Pandora desert. It’s something he purposefully ignored, that the temptation to have it all in his grasp - Helios, Hyperion, Atlas, Pandora, _everything_ \- to abandon Fiona, Sasha, Vaughn, even dear old Loader Bot, nearly claimed him in the end.

It was hard not to want it, sitting in a star-strewn office, surrounded by everything he ever wanted. Power, money, guns that made cool noises when you pressed the trigger, and the recognition - _adoration_ \- of the one person he had always wanted to become.

Thought he wanted to become.

Truth, but that specific truth in particular, was never going to be a pleasant thing to accept. Hell, it came close to being as unpleasant as a certain skin-peeling, psycho-fleeing incident that still gave him nightmares. Coward or no, skin pizza still ranked goddamn high on the list of things he wished he’d never found out about, though other things certainly came close to hitting that number one spot.

Ripping off his own arm and cutting out his own eye ranked… _pretty highly_.

And so Rhys, once just a humble company man dreaming for glory and recognition everlasting, now CEO of a company that consisted of himself and a mostly blind, slightly deranged scientist - if you got pedantic about who you could consider an Atlas employee these days - got what he’d always wanted. He rebuilt Atlas from the ground up. You’ve got to break something down to build it back up, and Atlas was already broken and gathering dust long before Rhys attempted to do something with the wreckage. Although it could never compare to the grandeur it had in days long since gone by, the Atlas he made, the Atlas that now was, it was something at least.

But it came with a price. It _always_ came with a price.

The person he’d been in days of old resented it, all of it - the musty chair he sat upon, the musty desk with the scattering of dusty papers about trade deals with bandits - who even used paper nowadays anyway? - and repurposing the mess Hyperion left behind - title of CEO be damned. Cassius had been a great help, since he was the last living member of the Atlas echelon and all. But it could never compare to how it felt, sitting in that golden chair with a hand on his shoulder and a guiding voice in his ear and the sight of the scarred moon stretching out before his eyes. So close, he had been _so close_ ; what he’d spent his whole life aiming for had been right there at his fingertips, just for a moment.

_Ambition blinds you_ \- it was probably the truest Jack ever said.

God, even after everything he was still sat there in this musty chair, sitting at his dusty desk, waxing lyrical and spouting quotes about the man who nearly strangled him to death. Well, made him strangle himself to death. Things get complicated when a semi-murderous AI of the guy you maybe - certainly - had an obsession with shares the same brain space as you.

As always, whenever the thought of Jack came to mind, Rhys brought his gaze down to the small drawer built under his desk, out of sight but not so out of mind. He reached out, wincing a little as his right arm hesitated to move for a moment - getting used to new cybernetics was never easy nor a quick process - and opened the drawer, the quiet sound of metal rubbing against wood breaking the silence within what he could hardly call an ‘office’. Inside was a small box locked and bolted shut, which he unlocked with deft fingers, opening it to reveal a carefully-wrapped pile of wire with a ring of dimly-glowing optics peering back up at him.

It was for his own peace of mind that it was kept hidden and locked away, to stop what - _who_ \- was trapped inside to escape. The mental image of the optics wire crawling around like some kind of demented slug, with Jack’s voice echoing out a crackling _Rhyssss_ as he tried to exact revenge, brought a smile to his features.

A quiet, niggling voice in the back of his mind echoed his own doubts, causing the smile to fall from his features, and he inwardly retorted with excuses because _of course_ he didn’t keep this box - didn’t keep the truth hidden that Handsome Jack, once-leader of Hyperion and raving megalomaniac, wasn’t dead, _not quite_ \- because he was ashamed of it, _of course_ he wasn’t worried about what anyone would do if they found out. Of course he wasn’t worried - terrified beyond measure - of anyone deciding to destroy his old ECHO eye, taking the last semi-living remnant of Jack down it.

Not at all.

_So why did you keep it?_ It was the golden ten million dollar question, one he refused to answer. He had the choice, to crush any remnant of Jack’s existence and scatter the remains until it became one with the desert. But he couldn’t. Why? He didn’t know. There were always guesses, hopeful answers and guilty answers and answers that delved a little too deep into the parts of Rhys’ mind that was mostly ignored, except on the rare occasion where his mouth moved and spoke things when he gave it no permission to do so.

Hell, maybe he was just naïve. Even after stealing Vasquez’s deal and landing on a planet in a stolen car and stealing fake Vault keys and living with someone else in his head and everything else that happened during the pointless quest to fulfil the Gortys Project, maybe he was still just an idiot.

Fiona would probably agree with him on that one. _Everyone would agree with that one_ , muttered the voice in his head. Closing the box and flinging it aside, as Rhys ran his fingers through his hair and slumped he wondered if this recent niggling voice of self-doubt was some kind of afterimage of Jack left behind. That thought caused him no petty amount of anxiety, especially when he remembered his new cybernetics, though he would admit it to no-one.

It was hard to forget it, his own hand around his throat and glass digging into his flesh and Jack begging him not to do it. _There’s absolutely nothing there_ \- what, in whatever realm existed within his cybernetics if he removed it? In death? Jack had done terrible things, had broken any element of trust he could ever have had in anyone, and yet he felt _guilty_. Guilty for the man who had lost everything, lost everyone, stabbed in the back by the people he cherished the most. Had Jack lied about that? He doubted it.

In fact, he even checked.

As soon as he recovered from crash-landing on Helios and his encounter with Jack, armed with… well, a new arm and a new ECHO eye, he followed in the footsteps Jack had taken - not quite in the way Jack had implied - and retraced Jack’s steps back to his old life. It wasn’t hard to find out some of it - Jack’s exploits were widely spoken of even on Pandora - but it was hard to separate truth from legend, absurdity from the awfully realistic things Jack had done. Rhys tried to track down Athena, knowing she of all people would be able to tell him more, but he couldn’t find her. Even with his slowly-growing list of contacts as Atlas CEO - it was a title that still held some weight at least - he couldn’t find any trace of her, other than the Crimson Raiders having her in their grasp.

But even with that particular thread of information cut off from him, he found enough bits and pieces as he travelled to put together enough of an idea of Jack’s life to know that amongst the lies and sweet-talking, there was some truth to what Jack had told him. More truth than Rhys even felt comfortable with, in fact. He felt hesitant to say Jack saw him as a friend - _maybe you should ask him_ \- but Rhys was the first person, it seemed, to have trusted him in a long time.

Naïveté put aside, Rhys wasn’t so much of an idiot not to recognise when someone genuinely cared about something. Jack cared about his daughter, indisputably. He cared about lots of other things, like money and disembowelling people and more heinous things than Rhys felt comfortable thinking about, but he cared about his daughter. He cared about his girlfriend. He did not care about his mother, evidently, but the more Rhys found out about her the more he didn’t blame Jack for it. He was human behind the mask - pun not intended - of ‘Handsome Jack’, and the more Rhys remembered Jack on his knees, begging him not to fling him back into whatever black abyss you entered when you died, the more he realised he genuinely cared about him.

He knew he could bring him back, if he wanted to. He could put the optic implant back in, or find a way to transfer the data over. Cassius would be interested in helping him, if he left out certain details - being all of the details - but the realism of the whole thing made Rhys hesitant to go forward with it. Maybe… maybe this is what Jack deserved, trapped in some cybernetic existence, forever sleeping, unable to harm anyone or anything for the rest of time. But then again, maybe he deserved a lot of things. What right did Rhys have to make that decision?

Well, sharing a body with him for a time gave him more right than others, he supposed, but it didn’t feel right to pass judgement. He was no innocent bystander. There was blood on his hands. He still woke up sometimes, choking on his own breath, shaking as he remembered the countless dead employees of Helios that he’d ejected into space with no regard for their existence. Even if they were a bunch of corporate scumbags, they had been _his_ corporate scumbags for a time, and he’d been just another scumbag before stealing Vasquez’s deal from under his nose.

The road to hell was paved with good intentions.

Slumped in his chair, peering out into the darkness of his office, Rhys looked down at the box lying haphazardly just out of reach, wire and glowing optics peeking out at him from the open lid, and sighed. With a wince, he stood and picked up the trail of wire and held it up, reaching up and running a finger along it. A ghost of a presence - a voice in his ear, bright eyes, hands at his throat - then nothing.

If he brought Jack back, there was always going to be a risk of events repeating themselves. If he was that concerned about it, however, he would have crushed the optics lying in his hands and left Jack’s memory to rot. But he didn’t. _You’ve gotta break it down to build it back up._ He’d broken Jack, reduced him to begging and pleading for his life, so couldn’t he build him back up again? He’d done it for Atlas, given it new life and built a life for himself out of the remnants of Helios’ wreckage.

Maybe the Jack who expected betrayal would be different to the Jack who was given mercy.

Was it pure, hopeful naiveté? Probably. Was Rhys an idiot for even considering it? Likely. Was he still going to look over the details of the small cybernetic company he was in contact with and consider it? Definitely. Whether he would regret it would be another thing entirely, but consequences be damned he had to live with his choices, and he’d been sat on this one for long enough.

He activated the hologram menu of his right arm, carefully holding his old optics in his left, and prepared to contact the necessary people, then stopped. An ECHO log from Fiona? Weird. He hadn’t been in contact with her since… well, since she abandoned him to die on Helios. Gritting his teeth, Rhys opened the log and hoped it was of her begging him to forgive her, hopefully calling him some untold hero deserving of praise as a nice plus.

Instead, he got something a little more frustrating, but _far_ more interesting.

Lowering his arm, placing his old optics back into its rightful box and pocketing it, Rhys tugged at his cuffs and brushed himself down, peering out into the dark with a smile. Jack could wait, if there was any sense of time to be had in whatever cybernetic purgatory Jack was trapped in.

For now, there was a ‘friend’ to meet and payback to be had.


End file.
